Leaving to college
Sky was wide awake when her little sister ran into her room, and once she got up in her bed, she started to jump, yelling: “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”
Her blonde curls were long enough to touch her toes, and she was wearing a nightgown, which had clouds on it. She was only five years old, but Sky knew she was going to be the most annoying girl in the wild world. Or at least in her world.
“Can you not do this?” Sky asked, pushing her head back into the pillow that she was hugging. She only got four hours of sleep, but it felt like thirty minutes. Today, she is leaving home for college in New York, and that itself was a very exciting change for her.
"Do what? This?” she asked while continuing it.
Sky sighed and stood up. “Rosie, please, I have a three-hour car drive to Columbia University, and the last thing I need is a migraine from this.”
“My jumping caused you a migraine?” Rosie asked, giggling in her hands.
“Not yet, but it will if you don’t stop this,” Sky warned her. “And it’s migraine, not migraine!”
“Alright, but Mom wants you to wake up,” Rosie said, sitting next to Sky. Sky lifted her, making her stand by the bed, and then made the bed.
“Tell Mom I’ll need some sheets and pillows to take with me,” she said to Rosie and pushed her out of her room.
Her suitcase was still open and not fully packed, and when she glanced at it, she sighed even more deeply and went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. Looking at herself in the mirror, she wasn’t surprised at how terrible she looked. Her black curls were all over the place, and her left eyebrow was bruised.
Going to a club with her friends before the day she was leaving for college was a bad idea in the long run, but she did it anyway, and now she can’t do anything about the fact that she looks like she was in a boxing fight. The simple answer to this was that she was defending her best friend, while some guy was hitting on her, and was hit by him from behind. The guy himself was definitely a boxing fighter and couldn't let her alone all night long, flirting and constantly asking her out, but she turned him down and hoped to God she'd never have to see him again.
She tried to use some of her mom’s powder to cover the bruise, but the truth was she didn’t even care if her parents saw it; she didn’t want to fight over the fact that she went out with one of her party-lover's best friends named Lisa, who happens to live next to their house and drives her parents crazy with her attitude. Lisa was the one who kept her sane while everything else in her life started to crash down. Of course, her parents didn’t understand it, but that didn’t change the fact that Lisa meant everything to her.
When she went back to her room to change her pyjamas to a pair of jeans and a grey t-shirt, she felt like she could throw up a week’s worth of lunches and dinners. She didn’t drink much last night at the club, but leaving for college was also something that made her puke a little. She was happy that she could leave this town and study English literature almost 300 miles away from home, but at the same time, she was anxious and a little sad to go.
"Eggs? Bacon? Or something else?" her mom - Clarisse - asked, while standing in the centre of the kitchen, holding a frying pan and a fork. Rosie sat behind the table and ate her porridge while watching her dad eat a tuna sandwich.
"Is this a fish?" she asked him.
Sky hid her smile and sat next to her little sister. Rosie could be very fussy when it comes to food, and Sky has seen it every day ever since her mother gave birth to her.
"Yes," Ricardo, their dad, answered her.
"Can I have a bite?" she asked then.
"You don't like your porridge?" Ricardo asked her.
"No," she said. "We are out of the apple jam, that's why."
"But we have a strawberry jam!" Clarisse said, holding it up for her to see. Rosie giggled, and she put it on her porridge, watching her eat it for a while before she turned around and made herself a chicken sandwich. When the coffee machine finished, she poured three cups of it and didn't put sugar in any of them.
"You must be very excited!" Clarisse said to her other daughter, giving her a coffee cup. "The drive there is going to be fun."
"Sure thing," Sky said and took the first sip of her coffee. She knew that her mom was hiding her sadness over the fact that her older daughter was flying off to college, but she was thankful that the morning didn't start with her crying over it. Sky loved her family very much and was sad to go, but at the same time, it was part of the journey of growing up, and she wished that her parents wouldn't make it hard for her.
"I love you, sweetie," Clarisse said, kissing her in her curls.
"I love you too, Mom," Sky answered with a small smile.
After breakfast, they all helped her pack the last things that she needed to take with her, and the drive to New York University, which was almost 300 miles away, started with a mother-daughter conversation about the upcoming changes in college life. If that was Clarisse's way of crying over it, Sky was totally fine with it, especially if it didn't make things weird for both of them. She was excited to go to college, and although leaving home was a bittersweet feeling, it still felt great and was the start of something good, at least, or so she thought.
